I kept waiting for someone to ask me why I liked it so much. “Oh, I think it’s funny,” I would tell them.

But that wasn’t all of it. One of the main things about the show that had so completely hooked my interest was that it was rooted in the decade(s) that produced it: the late 1970s and early eighties. The seventies were a bleak time, I had no illusions about that. Bombings, terrorism, pointless war, the rise of cults, environmental alarmism, and at the end of it, Reagan. Nobody who actually lived through that decade enjoyed it. But it was gone, it was done, and it now sat safely in its little historical drawer. Nothing would change it. That’s the beauty of anything set firmly in the past, especially a past time that was never one’s present—you know how it ends.

And then there were the character dynamics. The roommates and landlords formed a family unit, one forged not by blood but by circumstance, by chance, and they loved one another with a purity I had never experienced in real life. The lines were clearly drawn on Three’s Company. Everyone always knew their part, their value. And because they were not blood, they were all outsiders. That appealed to me on a soul level, that I could walk among them, be them, and experience such acceptance. Three’s Company was a door into a new way of life, an immersion into a different decade, into lives and histories that were different from my own, into a family that could not be broken. And for all their foibles, the characters were good. They were good people living good, decent lives. They rarely fell into trouble or tragedy that could not be reversed in twenty minutes; they never hurt others in any permanent way.

I had been watching good people my whole life from a distance, and though I had tried—over and over I’d tried—I had never been able to excoriate the deep, deep wrongness of being that I felt ever since I was a little kid. I was always choosing the wrong thing, always making the wrong moves. Always outside. The goodness, the rightness, of others fascinated me, the way that things one is not born into usually do. In a way, my project was an opportunity to study it close-up. I wanted to know what it was like, even if it was only for one minute in a decade, to feel good because I was good, because I was born the right way.

All in all I wanted to touch the fabrics, to eat the ice cream, to feel the same afternoon sunlight a model kicking up her heels in a seventies-era Sears autumn catalog was selling. The humming safety of a packaged life. I wanted to experience a whole other timeline. Through Three’s Company I would transcend the existence of Bonnie Lincoln. Time itself would no longer be an enemy. The filth of my own life would cease to be a threat.